Animals from birds to dung beetles may do it, too — and might become disoriented as our city lights drown out the heavens.

James Foster and Marie Dacke performing orientation experiments at a dark-sky site in rural Limpopo, South Africa, with a dung beetle.Credit...Chris Collingridge.

One moonless night a little more than a decade ago, Marie Dacke and Eric Warrant, animal vision experts from Lund University in Sweden, made a surprise discovery in South Africa.

The researchers had been watching nocturnal dung beetles, miniature Sisyphuses of the savanna, as they tumbled giant balls of dung.

Her team’s newest study, published Thursday, found that dung beetles became confused under light-swamped skies?

If seals could discern stars, Dr.

This time two seals were invited to participate, Nick and his even cleverer brother, Malte.

While seals might steer by the stars, some birds definitely do, as more than a half-century of experiments inspired by Stephen T.

Emlen, then a graduate student at the University of Michigan and now an emeritus professor at Cornell, began carrying indigo buntings into a planetarium in the evenings.

Indigo buntings migrate at night, flying as far as 2,000 miles.

Emlen showed that if indigo buntings were exposed to the stars, the birds hopped in a manner indicating that they knew which way was north.

Human observers know that at night the stars trace circles in the sky as Earth spins on its axis.

Emlen enlisted young indigo buntings that had just left their nests.

In the glittering dark, each young bunting had apparently spent some time looking up, studying, as the stars traced circles in the night sky.

Warrant had their eureka moment in South Africa with dung beetles.

After a dung beetle arrives on a dung pile, it painstakingly cobbles together a snowball of dung larger than itself.

Through a dung beetle’s compound eyes, stars appear as blobs, not as points of light.

After its spinning scan, a beetle rolls its ball in a straight line away from the dung pile for a few minutes, on a random heading.

More confusing were the featureless, light-swamped skies you might expect in suburbs: The beetles just went in circles.

“What we’ve seen on a much smaller scale with the dung beetles could have huge impacts on birds and seals and migratory moths,” Dr.

A few of the South African dung beetles now live in the lab in Lund, where the researchers sometimes study them under a fully simulated sky.

Emlen kept the Betelgeuse-beguiled indigo buntings in his lab through the winter and released them in the spring.

Nick now lives in a sprawling harbor lab that opens to the Baltic Sea; at night, he and the other seals in the enclosure can see fantastic skies overhead, Dr